New Voting Page

Well each time I change the voting page, I get some compliments, and some complaints. Personally I really like what I've done, and hopefully its a good compromise between slowing down the Russian hackers and keeping the site fun, about webcomics, and relatively easy.

Ok, this morning I had 3 responses and 4000 new votes for various webcomics. Ok guys, 4000 new votes means the majority of people can vote successfully, thats great! But we had some valid criticism from Sen

Sen said the new layout seems more crammed, and she didn't really like the captcha style authentication, but she understood why. She also liked not having any flash advertisements while logged in. SHe also wondered about so many dead links with the character avatars.

Those were all great items, and I promptly disabled the flash ads while logged in and having the setting disabled, that was an oversight. I explained how a hacker filled up my database with fake clicks while getting a site up to #16 which prompted the change. And fixed a few things, all great things, so if you can, check out his webcomics, Millennium or LoveFeast I love when webcomic owners get involved and give me advice to improve the site, so thanks a lot Sen!

I received an email from someone else who complained about the front page having black backgrounds for the text? That shouldn't be with the new CSS file, so either the old CSS file is cached, or hes using a funky browser other than firefox or IE that doesn't like what I've done. If thats the case, can someone let me know what browser is having problems with the site? I don't really support anything but the big 3, but I always try to improve the experience for everyone if I can.

Finally, someone thought I changed to the captcha to make people watch the advertisements. First, if I cared about that, I wouldn't let users register for FREE and disable the ads. Second, I've had webcomic owners request captcha for months, because they get sick and tired of seeing hackers get webcomics higher than theirs. If they had their way, I'd impliment a real Captcha like google has, with squigly letters 2 words, blah blah, instead I'm asking for 3 letters, sometimes 2 with short names. ;) I may disable this again, if I can come up with an alternative to make it more difficult for hackers. I thought about changing the vote page every 3 days forever, but thats a lot of work and would only marginally hinder their efforts. This way may only marginally hinder the more advanced hackers too, but at least it slows down a good chunk of them.

Thanks all, hope everyone has a happy new year! I"ll update this as more feedback and changes come in.